Blogs from Zambia, Africa - page 92

Zambia is acknowledged as one of the world's safest places to visit, and is home to friendly people. The country boasts the majesty of the world's biggest waterfall in Victoria Falls, the wild Zambezi river, and world class game reserves. These attractions make an impressive tourist package, and to continue from the previous journal ... our safari team kept rolling on! We reluctantly left the gorgeous Okavango Delta in Botswana and piled into the truck to drive to the final destination in our eight day safari. We crossed the border into Zambia and finished our safari at a quality hostel in Livingstone, the town on the Zambian side of the awesome Victoria Falls. We checked into the hostel mid afternoon, dear reader, and a few of us wasted no time in getting to the mighty Victoria ... read more

Romantic Zambia: Becoming a woman for a day The purpose of this day was for me to start to get a bit of a feel for some of the typical tasks that a woman in Zambia does everyday. Just as how it takes an enormous amount of time and effort to deeply integrate fully into a culture, it also will take a lot more then spending a single day doing a few tasks that women do everyday to really understand what their lives are like. Nonetheless, it was to be a first step and if nothing else at least I would So, my day as a woman awoke with the sunrise. Then grabbing my little bundle of straw, I swept out all the dirt out from inside my house and then swept all that dirt away ... read more

Journal Entry 3: Life in Livingstone So after my two weeks of training in Mazabuka I was off to the tourist capital of Zambia, Livingstone. I have been there for the past two weeks again learning about opeating a development field office after which I've come back to the capital, Lusaka, for a final debrief. Finally, tomorrow I will be off to my home, the small town where I will be living, working, and reporting to you for the majority of my time here, Choma. Livingstone is the tourist capital of Zambia for a reason. It is home to one of the most spectacular sights in the entire world, Victoria Falls. Not to be outdone, it is also home to a whole range of wildlife viewing opportunities and extreme sports such as white water rafting ... read more

Development Point: Sleeping With the Enemy AAAHHHH CHHHUUUU! I wildly awoke myself from my deep slumber with a giant sneeze. I pondered for a second on why it was so dry in the air around me. It only took a second to shake off my sleepy haze to remember that it was the 1600 - 25kg bags of mealie meal that I was sharing this little house with. Mealie meal is the flour like ground up maize powder used in making Zambia’s staple food, Nsima. The reason there were 1600 bags of mealie meal in my house wasn’t because I was well versed in Zambian economics and I had purchased a decades supply of it knowing that the looming drought will cause the food prices to skyrocket in a couple months. That would only be ... read more

Development Point: Leadership Development and Peer Education In my opinion, having outsiders coming into the village, whether it’s workers from developed countries or local NGO workers who live in the city, isn’t as effective in terms of educating groups on a broad scale as having someone from inside their social network educating them instead. From my observations and experience, a teaching technique called peer-education, is one of the most effective ways of facilitating behavioural change. This is based on the idea that people are much more willing to make changes in their lives if someone of whom they association themselves with closely is able to make the same change in their lives. The traditional development way of teaching, having ‘experts’ come in and explain information to the local people, isn’t as effective because development workers, whether ... read more